FT Questions....

[Scott Stevenson]

Scott, thanks for the input. Ill touch up on some of your responses.

In response to Q1:

I have been doing the intensive cruise's in the past as so..

2 weeks total (as a blast has been 6 weeks in the past) so 1/3 of the blast cruising as the book. This has consisted of dropping down a tier so down to tier 1 as I have found turbo tier II just right for me in terms of volume and maintaining intensity.

Cruise Setup.

Tuesday - Day 3
Friday - Day 4
Monday - Day 3
Thursday - Day 4.

then the rest of the time off completely (4 days) until I restart the next blast which would be Tuesday again (this typically is the final 1/3 of the cruise, away from weights).


Essentially this means i'm doubling up on rest days before each session as I normally do a
Tuesday - Day 1
Thursday - Day 2
Saturday - Day 3
Sunday - Day 4 split.

Again, comment if you believe I have set this up wrong so I can change and make EVEN FURTHER PROGRESS!

How did you do this when you have "no access to the gym?"

Q2 / Q3 / Q4.

So when I started my cut, initially it was a diet change as throughout my off season I was sitting at 4500 kcals on a training day @ 170lbs. This gave me an instant relief from all the eating and my g.i. tract a break from all the food.

From there I added cardio as wanted to do something differently to the previous years rather than just dropping food and see what the results were as I mentioned in the past, I would just drop food and do minimal cardio but that resulted in me losing all my hard earned off season gains. So a different approach has been to maintain calories as high as possible and create a deficit and facilitate fat loss via cardio only (after initial diet change).

I see an issue here that fits with the below, too, I think. If you're dropping your kcal so fast that you're on a trajectory for using all y our off-season gains, then one would typically SLOW that progress down, rather than continue,. using strength as a guage of muscle mass.

By analogy, If you see a wall coming at you (via strength and the mirror) as you drive down the road, then you'd stop and change direction, eh?...

Cardio wise this time around started on 20 mins LISS Daily, a walk or whatever it may be, no monitoring HR or anything.
This worked for a while and as things progressed or should I say stagnated.

I increased this further so this went up to 30 mins LISS upon wake.

Then from there 2 sessions of 20 mins a day due to time constraints
(40 mins total).

I wont carry on but eventually I have worked up to 1 hour sessions twice a day @ 135bpm. LISS upon wake, and a further session at Lunchtime, both of these via eliptical machine or spin bike due to busting my ankle (I posted about that a few pages back) my weight session being in the evening and as far away from cardio as possible. Now I know its not completely accurate by all means and just a guide but my HR Monitor (Not the one's on the machines) say I have achieved 1400 Kcal deficit by cardio approx.

1400 kcal a day x 7 = 9,800 a week from LISS.
I would say approx 800-1000 kcals further on training days obtained from my weight sessions too. So Approx 13-14k kcals a week burnt in total.

Calorie wise I am now on approx 2800 training day and 2000 rest day @ 153lb.
I started the cut at around 168ish so 15lb drop in 9 weeks.. I would say 1-2lb of that has been muscle at a MAXIMUM (again not accurate as haven't had a DEXA scan) but this is looking and judging by the mirror, and I tell you something I have made some significant improvements).

So as mentioned as of last week I started to suffer symptoms of overtraining (as listed in the book) so niggles, increased recovery times, soreness, regression on lifts etc etc. Now like I said I didn't and still don't want the blast to end prematurely due to the holiday being so imminent and what would in turn result in nearly a month off a starting a new blast. E.g. Start the cruise now, approx 2 weeks of IC, then holiday starts.. 2 weeks off sailing (no gym obviously) that equates to nearly 30 days. 30 days until I start a new blast? No thanks .

That point last week would have been the time to start adjusting, not now when you're in the hole, so to speak.

As of this week, to try prolong this phase / blast until I go on holiday I have reduced cardio by 50% so I am now down to 1 hour a day in an effort to maintain training intensity and progressively beating the log book.

How do you suggest I prolong this blast or at the very least maintain training of some sort up until I go on holiday. I understand regardless that the blast will be coming to an end as of Sunday (that's if I can make it) and from there I will be 8 days away from my vacation. 8 days to perform an IC and hit some tier 1 MR's as you normally would either like I have done before (listed above) or as you advise, before I then take a further prolonged period amount of time off (14 days complete rest).

This is a pretty long winded post but hopefully understand my position and can advise accordingly. As always.. thanks a bunch!

I'd suggest you cut your cardio entirely and go right into a cruise, TBH as it sounds like if you try to lose more fat, you ARE going to end up non-functionally overreached or overtrained. (non-functional overreaching is when you've overreached and put yourself in a place where you can recover in a matter of many days / several weeks (shorter than if truly overtrained), but that recovery process doesn't involve a rebound in training gains or overshoot in strength, etc. )

Simply cut your losses and stick with what you've managed so far. You will likely fill out (esp. legs) eating just your current diet for the next couple days and thereafter you can adjust diet as needed to ensure y you're not gaining any fat (but ALSO able to recover from the training). I would suspect that your current caloric input will be right on for leveling you and allowing an IC rebound such that you're ina great place for your vacation.

(It also sounds like you could use just some good old time away from the gym at this point - a solid vacation - so this would be a good time to ensure that you're no longer overreached and can come back after vacation ready to tackle the gym again.)

So, that's my best guess, but I admit it's limited b/c YOU are the one living this and I have the sense that you're still getting the hang of autoregualting . That's a GREAT amount of fat loss for that period, so I'd take that and run with it (but leave out the literal running part).

-S


[/quote]